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The Bugs Stop at Our Bay

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website which provides calamitic forecasts was working efficiently with the standard user load but the moment Hurricane Irma of Category 5 struck across the northern Caribbean islands and Florida, the website couldn’t handle the spiked load and crashed. The whirlwind caused across areas was felt by the people on the web too, wherein the website failed to give updates on the catastrophe. This makes one ponder the importance of load testing which is felt in real time, in times of need and desperation, where the impact of such crashes directly affects the users, who here specifically, were desperate for the updates. Such kind of load becomes a concerning factor, but with load testing by the side, ‘the more the ‘scarier’’ can be remediated.

What comes into play is how well we leverage our capabilities in ensuring smooth performance of a website when a number of users log into it. This can be achieved by engaging independent testing organisations that can perform load and performance testing, whether the application is already live or still in production. For performing such kind of testing, there are an array of load testing tools, both off-the-shelf like HP LoadRunner or Borland SilkPerformer and some open-source ones such as JMeter. JMeter is predominantly used because it serves the purpose well, along with being an open-source tool. Testers today have imbibed hands-on knowledge on the this tool as well as the process of load testing. For checking the performance of a website, it becomes imperative to thoroughly analyze the normal load on the site and then, deploy simulators in one’s framework to check whether the website is able to handle the desired load. When our testers recently leveraged load testing, they were well equipped with the capabilities of using JMeter, implementing cron jobs and running the load tests with various vusers load to analyze the tipping point of a website. No company wants their customers to suffer, but it so happens that with such frequent crashes or slow response time, users tend to shift their allegiance to other similar websites, or in the case above, get distressed.

To ensure that users don’t face such an issue, it is important for organisations to get load testing conducted on their website or web based application. The independent testing organisations have expertise in performing thorough load testing and identifying the bottlenecks that need to be resolved to avoid poor response time during such catastrophic situations. Thus, with rigorous load testing, one need not worry, especially in times of need